Echoes of the Prophecy
by Agas Spenjahgra VII
Summary: Gyendal discovers that there's more to the Darkthrop prophecy than meets the eye. When forced to be involved in a mission to prevent dark powers from rising, would he allow himself to be reformed, or would he stubbornly continue to pursue power?
1. Chapter 1

_Note: I think the character label is a bit conspicuous, heh. But Demon Realm = excuse to include daevas into the plot. _

_Hopefully everything would make sense in time._

* * *

Fail once, it's an unfortunate mistake.

Fail twice, it's carelessness.

Fail thrice, it's foolishness.

Fail four times...

Ever since Gyendal lost his undead immortality, every decision he made seemed to only lead to doom. With every failure he experienced, he looked back and saw dozens of weak links, and wondered how he could have missed them. The only conclusion he could draw from it was that the mortal mind was inherently inferior.

When the darklings tossed him into the dungeon cel, Gyendal barely managed to catch himself before he hit the floor. His hands already charging with mana, he twisted himself back upright just in time to see the darklings hopping out the cel's gate.

_Oh, no, you don't. _

There was no time to form spells. He flung out his hands, and bursts of violet light hurtled towards the retreating darklings.

Too late! The gate slammed shut mere slivers of seconds before the raw magic made impact. The metal bars glowed violet and shuddered a little, but immediately turned back to normal.

Before he could stop himself, Gyendal let out a frustrated snarl. He flung a fireball at the gate, followed by more fireballs in increasingly larger size. He didn't wait for impact before casting orbs of lightning and icicle shards after them. A dozen more fireballs followed. Then explosive spells and dark curses. More lightning. Ice boulders. Solid rock boulders. Fire again. Sand storm. Water blasts.

By the time the paused to take a gasp of breath, the spells had all fizzled into nothing. The ice and boulders banged and clanged against the metal, but they, too, dissolved away without leaving even a single scratch.

Gyendal drew a hissing breath. He would not let something like a paltry _door_ best him in magic. Reaching deep inside into his core, he called for every last strain of power in him and pulled them to his hands. Underfall, like much of the rest of Underworld, was infused with a touch of Shadows. Darkling magic was no exception. Surely, a powerful Light spell could break the magic.

Gyendal thought through his spell options. He didn't have much. As a vampire, Shadows permeated him to the very core of his magic, and countered the effectiveness of Light spells.

As a mortal, the taint of Shadow has disappeared from his core. He had not considered learning Light spells even after knowing about the darklings ー another point in the long list of his many misjudgements ー so the only ones he knew were the healing spells he got out of that timid little moth when he had control over her. He would need to be a little creative.

After some deliberation, he chose the Blessing spell. Originally meant to counter curses, he thought it would have the best chance to break the barrier. He modified the weave of magic to give it a destructive edge. It would not be a gentle, ebbing glow pushing out the dark touch of a curse. It would be like the sun, scorching and blazing in an explosion of light.

He thought he might go blind when he finally released the spell at the gate. He was certain he could still _see_ the light from behind his closed eyelids. He turned away and ducked his face into his upper right arm. Awkwardly, he shifted his shoulders in an effort to move his cloak to better cover his face, without breaking the spell's contact.

It wasn't easy. He'd poured all of his mana into the spell, but there was no signs if the barrier giving away. It felt very much like pushing his bare hands into a solid wall of steel.

Just then, he felt his right arm twitch slightly. He gritted his teeth, and stubbornly pressed on. His body was giving out, but he was determined to see that accursed gate blasted off its hinges, even though his mind was screaming louder and louder at him about how futile this was.

Both his arms began to tremble, not too long after. His head throbbed, and he convinced himself that he was swaying only because of the barrier was pushing back at him. He firmly planted his feet into the stone floor, and pushed the light beam harder.

Slowly, his knees began to buckle and his arms were drooping. His ears were ringing. His eyes burned hotter and hotter. Even so, he persisted.

He would succed, _he would succeed... _

There was a tingle in his nose, then, followed by a runny sensation.

Gyendal didn't need vampire senses to know it was blood. Instinctively, he ran his tongue over his lips to wipe off the trickling blood.

Dripping blood.

Life.

Draining life.

Mortality.

It was as though something inside him snuffed out at that very moment. The taste of blood, once a relish, was now nothing but a sickening, metallic tang. A reminder of this one fact: He was not immortal.

It truly dawned on him, then, for the first time in goddess knows how long, that death was a possibility for him. Ever since the Orb of Life restored his soul, he had thought himself to be aware enough of his weakened state to have a ready supply of elixir on him at all times. It had never occurred to him, however, that his body could no longer endure the strain of magic as well as it used to.

Dying was not a risk worth taking for the sake of breaking down a door.

A single, dejected thought flitted through his mind, as he finally cut off the flow of mana: _I've failed again. _

Then everything turned black.


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: This... took longer than I thought, and it went for longer than I intended it to be... I thought to break this into two chapters, but I also didn't want to drag the prison scenes out for too long._

* * *

"It's easy, really. You understand? I doubt the darklings expect to capture, say, a dragon."

Gyendal closed his eyes and leaned back his head against the cel wall. He was tired, and had no strength to make the boy's chatter stop. He crossed his arms, and firmly remained sitting still. Perhaps pretending to be asleep would deter the brat from expecting a response...

"So, to get out of here, we use not-magic POWER!"

The boy said that last word with such a triumphant tone, that Gyendal jolted before he could help himself. Blearily, he cracked an eye open and glanced over. The boy grinned back, his bright green eyes seeming to glitter in the gloom.

"Your point?" Gyendal finally asked, reluctantly. He didn't need to hear useless solutions from a silly boy who seemed to be barely out of his teenage years. The sooner Gyendal could prove the brat wrong, the sooner he'd make the brat shut up.

"Doors have keys, yes?" The boy gestured towards the keyhole on the gate a little forcefully, and his hand barely missed smacking into the iron.

_Congratulations, you have eyes. _Gyendal thought. "And?"

"It needs key, so if no magic, we break the door," the boy replied, pumping up both fists. For a moment his pale face seemed to glow faintly as he spoke.

Gyendal blinked and the boy was no longer glowing. "How would you do that?" he asked, shaking his head.

"I break the door," the boy repeated, as he tied his long, white hair back into a tail at the nape of his neck.

Exasperated, Gyendal opened his mouth to ask once more, when the boy raised one leg and kicked the gate.

CRASH!

The wall exploded.

No, it wasn't an explosion; the boy had missed the gate, and rammed his foot _through the wall. _

Even as Gyendal stared in disbelief, the boy pulled his foot loose from the hole he'd just made and a sizeable portion of the wall came out with it. The boy then shuffled over to the gate, and gave it a firm shake. A few more chunks of stone crumbled loose and the gate opened. He drew in a sharp breath.

_Ah. Of course_.

The cel's gate had no frame; its hinges and lock were attached directly to the stone wall. The boy had not been aiming to break down the gate, after all, but to dislodge the lock... by smashing the wall. Shaking his head, Gyendal dusted himself and moved towards the gate. Odd as it may be, the boy _was helping him escape, _and—

✠••••✠••••✠

He started awake with a gasp, which immediately turned into a raspy cough when the dusty air stung his throat.

It took him a few moments to gather enough senses to realize that he was sprawled face-down on the stone floor.

Normally he would have been appalled to find himself in such a humiliating posture, but at the moment, all he could focus on was how his body was at once in pain and numb. Were it not for the spasms that racked his body with his coughing, he might have thought himself to have been petrified. His head felt as though it would split open with every miniscule movement he made.

Gyendal gritted his teeth. Ignoring the throbbing pain, he pushed against the floor and forced himself to roll over.

"Uurgh..."

A painful jolt rippled all the way to his fingertips as his back hit the floor with a solid thump. This time, he had managed to hold himself together enough to prevent but the tiniest groan spill out of his mouth.

_That really, really hurts. _

His hand was trembling when he reached for his potions. It took all of his concentration to not let the small, glass vial from slipping through his fingers. Muttering curses all the way through, he managed to pull open the vial's stopper, with much difficulty, and tip its contents into his mouth.

In truth, he all but splashed the elixir on his own face with his unsteady fingers, but he had swallowed enough that he no longer felt like an invalid . He sat up immediately. He had not been so pathetically indisposed since... since...

_No!_

Holding back an uncouth scream, he threw the vial in his hand as hard as he possibly could at the wall and snatched another vial of elixir from his tunic. He drained its contents, swallowing each gulp slowly and deliberately to scatter the thought.

Gyendal dropped the second empty vial as he stood up. He was alone in the cel. There were no chipper teenagers with absurdly strong kicks, and the gate still stood as firmly locked as it had been before he blacked out. He rubbed his face. What an utterly absurd dream. If boulders hadn't made even so much of a scratch at the gate, there was no reason to think pummelling directly at it would make any difference... or would it?

A memory floated to his mind, from a time that seemed like an entirely different existence. There was a grimoire he had been after, and he had finally found its hiding place. Te'ijal had been bored enough on her own – she hadn't found herself that infuriating husband of hers, then – that she had invited herself to the journey.

Many traps later, the two of them had been met with a pair of enchanted golems that swatted away his spells like mere flies. At the time, he remembered thinking that he was grateful for having his sister with him, as Te'ijal's arrows crushed the golem's stone fingers. He remembered being momentarily struck in awe, as she shot through the golems' power cores and rendered them all lifeless.

Just like the cel gate, the golems were impervious to the ice and rocks he had conjured... with _magic_. Te'ijal, however, had always fought with nothing but raw physical strength. Her arrows were devoid of any traces of mana whatsoever.

_Could it be...?_

Frowning, Gyendal approached the gate. He pulled off one glove, and pressed a palm to the iron bars. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on the light thrum of magic beneath his skin. It took him a few moments to finally grasp the distinct patterns of the spells woven into the barrier, and a little longer still to recall how to identify them. He had not needed to perform a magic diagnosis for too long. Typically used to identify barriers and traps, he had hardly any use for it when he has yet to encounter anything – aside from the Darkthrop orbs – that didn't crumble when hit by the sheer force of his spells and curses .

_A powerful mana defense... portal barriers... ah. _

He had located the component of the barrier meant to shield the cel against physical attacks, but it was much weaker than the other protections. Gyendal had never been one to believe in prophetic dreams, but he couldn't help the tiny flare within him that hoped the dream had directed him towards an answer. Truly, as the boy in the dream had said, whoever built this place had not been worried about prisoners having enough strength to bash down the structure. He himself was not capable of doing such a thing, but perhaps it's possible to summon a creature who could —

He dismissed the idea instantly. _No, that would be unwise._

The art of summoning was something he had only but brushed the surface of. The only being he had managed to summon thus far was _Mordred_. He had not spared the time to study the subject or refine his skills since. Then the only option he had was to pick the lock. He briefly scanned the barrier further, and he only found protections against unlocking spells. There was nothing that would prevent manual lock picking from working. His elation was, however, immediately dampened when he realized that he could not do that either.

With a grimace, Gyendal pulled his hand away from the gate and replaced his glove. He had acquired lock picks as part of the Spook disguise, but he had never bothered to learn to use them. Mel had dared him to pick open some doors a few times, but he had discreetly used unlocking spells, then. The speed by which he which he accomplished them had seemed to impress her, so he had no reason to change his methods.

_It would have been convenient if the lock picking set came with usage instructions,_ he mused.

Instructions.

Something about that idea struck his mind, and he mulled over it. Instructions meant text. Text meant writing. Writing meant books... or scrolls...

_The Augurers' Library._

Upon that realization, he fumbled to pull out the silver chain hidden under his tunics. He had worn it around his neck for as long as he could remember, that he barely registered its presence anymore. A pendant hung from it, shaped like a cross with its horizontal bars tilted upwards like a "Y". Braided silver framed the pendant in a diamond shape, its corners tipped with small, black crystals. A shorter chain dangled from the bottom-most crystal, on which was attached two feather-shaped ornaments of unidentifiable silky material.

Gyendal drifted his fingers over the feathers, channeling just the tiniest amount of mana into them.

Then pendant glowed momentarily with miniscule runes all over the silver. No sooner as the runes faded away, streams of red light shone out, like sunlight through a window. The red beams then shifted, forming a scroll of light that drifted around the cel as it unfurled. Glowing shapes dotted the scroll: notes inscribed in a unique arrangement of runes that only he could understand.

He waved a number of them aside, and new runes slid into his view. He had no use of the most recent ones, only added shortly before the whole Darkthrop debacle began. Though he could not remember, he knew, as surely as he knew his own name, that he had owned this library before he became a vampire. There was the ever-so-slight possibility that, before he grew over-confident of his magic, he had recorded instructions on lock picking.

He skimmed past bulks of notes on demon summoning and various spells to conjure darkness. Other than some markers for locations of interest, not a single one of them are not about magic. One note had seemed promising, labelled "lock pick". When he grasped at the runes, however, the memory that entered his mind was of the unlocking spell he already knew about.

As the further back he went, Gyendal recognized the notes less and less, and he began to slow his reading... only to find himself frustrated because half of the words made no sense whatsoever. He hadn't realized it earlier, because the newest of his entries were still fresh in his mind. Despite the vague, often single-worded descriptions, he still knew the notes labelled "Darkthrop" –followed by a series of numbers – were about the Orbs of Magic. With his older notes, no matter how he stared at them, he couldn't remember what "silver" or "moon" was referring to.

With a deep sigh, he resigned himself to the long arduous process of reading the memory notes, one by one.

✠••••✠••••✠

Time passed, though Gyendal couldn't tell how long. The only semblance to time markers he had were the periods when the darklings appeared to slide food and water through the bars.

He had been mildly surprised that the darklings weren't ordered to starve him, but he didn't dwell on it. He was more concerned about keeping his daily reading a secret. The darklings may not have been the smartest, but he couldn't risk allowing them to see his Library regardless. Who knows what they would do to it if they found out. He always made sure to wait for the darklings to be completely out of sight and out of hearing range before he started his reading again.

There was a point in time where the notes gradually started to be more meticulously written than he presently was. The long forgotten notes were actually inscribed in detail. "Protection spell against sirens' enchantments", one of them said. He reached for the note. It sounded like it could be useful. A flash of memory filled his mind. Even as he thought he recognized the spell, he noted that he had recorded not just the spell, but also the fact that it was druid Rashnu who had taught him that. There was also a brief twinge of elation and gratefulness that nudged at his heart. He frowned slightly, and shook off the strange sensation.

_How sentimental, _he thought to himself as he continued his reading.

At first he thought he had been so impressed by the spell when he first learnt it that he accidentally recorded his feelings into the note. However, when the next few memories he opened also carried traces of emotion in them, he had to close the Library for the time being. For a moment he could only stare mutely into nothing. He felt oddly hollow. Had he not himself dismissed the emotions as foolish sentiments? Yet, after reliving those memories, it was like finding something he never knew he lost; a part of him wondered how he could've lived without them for so long.

✠••••✠••••✠

He was almost caught, once.

Gyendal had thought the darklings had cleared out of the dungeons. Just as he was about to begin reading, a darkling suddenly appeared at the gate. Before the darkling could notice what he was doing, Gyendal cast fireballs and flung them at the walls to mask the Library's red glow. By the time the fires fizzled out, he'd managed to put the Library away.

"I forgot your water," the darkling said in an annoyingly squeaky voice, pushing a cup inside the cel, "And don't worry, you can't escape no matter what you do."

The darkling ran off, giggling, and Gyendal said nothing. He picked at the food and water and sat quietly for a while to make sure the darklings weren't going to return for something else they forgot.

When he picked up his reading from the last place he left off, it was with no little trepidation. The memories were at once familiar and foreign. He supposed it was similar to that time when he glimpsed at his reflection in a mirror. To see his own face after hundreds of years had been unsettling, and much more so reawakening old memories that he no longer knew he had. His reading progress slowed even more because of it. For every note and spell, he took more time to mull over them before deciding whether it was worth accessing. All the while, a treacherous voice at the back of his mind jeered at his cowardice.

_You fear your emotions; your humanity._

_No, I do not._

He focused harder on the text of the Library, shouting the words mentally, even to the point of the words almost becoming meaningless. Anything to drown out that stubborn little voice —

Just then, a word caught his attention, interrupting his train of thought. It was hard to miss, as it was inscribed in plain letters instead of the coded runes everything else was written in.

"Unmagic", it said.

Gyendal looked at it warily. The word made no sense to him, and it was clearly inscribed in a handwriting that was not his. At first he considered that it was written by the person who owned the Library before him; his parents, perhaps, or his teacher. A quick look at the notes surrounding it, however, indicated that it wasn't the case. He couldn't see any other note in the same handwriting. He would need to read the memory to know what it was, and he was reluctant. It was as much a potential danger as it was a possible solution.

_Excuses, _says his inner voice.

He shook his head, but he had to admit the voice wasn't wrong. One does not find a dragon's egg without venturing into the dragon's nest, as the saying goes. He cast all the protective spells he knew, and braced himself as he closed his hand around the mysterious word. Almost immediately, he was seized by the odd sensation of sinking and floating at the same time. He vaguely remembered experiencing the same feeling upon entering the moth's mind. There was no time to dwell on it, however, as a surge of information rushed at him.

He was quite certain he gasped; whether from awe or from the shock of the mental force, he couldn't tell.

Gyendal was reeling when the sensation dissipated, and he felt like he'd just awoken from a deep sleep. He pressed a hand to his forehead, staring ahead but seeing nothing, as he mulled over the memory that has now become his. He mentally went over the series procedures—the memories that were his and yet not his—that he knew was meant to unravel the weave of spells – any spells. Shaking his head, he glanced at the gate. It was too soon to feel triumphant, but there was no harm in trying this new knowledge on the cel's barrier. At worst, the method would simply not work and he'd have to go back further through his notes. He grabbed the pendant and commanded the Library to "close". The scroll of light immediately faded out.

Turning his focus on the gate, he removed both his gloves. He used one hand to scan the barrier once more. This time, he was looking for the imperfections in the magic. Spells that are layered together to create a more complex magic, no matter how skillfully done, always had points of imperfections where two or more spells clash; like threads matting into a knot, or musical instruments that produced a dissonant sound when played together.

_There, I sense one. _

With his other hand, Gyendal aimed a bolt of mana at the kink. A small shudder rippled through the entire barrier, but the break did not knit back together. There was a permanent disruption in the magic.

"It really worked!" he muttered, as understanding slowly dawned on him.

Like a weak link in a chain, or gaps in a suit of armour, these imperfections can be easily broken through. Make enough disruptions in the weave, and the whole spell will collapse. He imagined it was like cutting through a steel net, one wire at a time.

With renewed vigour, Gyendal threw himself into the effort. It would take time, certainly, but freedom is within reach. Soon, he would finally have his revenge.

* * *

_End notes: I'm afraid I can't describe the pendant very well. It looks something like this (take out the spaces): __www. deviantart angelerenoir /art / Aveyond-Weekly-Fake-magazine- 191982244_


End file.
